


sometimes it's hard to learn from all your mistakes

by misszuipperips



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Light Angst, M/M, Possibly Unrequited Love, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), Pre-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-13 14:46:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14114634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misszuipperips/pseuds/misszuipperips
Summary: Hermann wasn't one for feelings, and he wasn't exactly great with friendship. A series of misunderstandings occur because of this, and then somehow Newt ends up at Shao Corporation with someone called Alice.(a timeline between the end of Pacific Rim and Uprising and an attempt at stringing together why Newt and Hermann haven't spoken like at all to each other in this gap.)





	sometimes it's hard to learn from all your mistakes

It was a foolish assumption, upon reflection, to think that once the Breach was closed that he and Newton would continue to work together in the same disharmony. There was no call to action once the dust had settled—there was no need for their frenzied arguments to continue now that the kaiju had been stopped.

No need to share a lab.

He tried to pull his chin up and tell himself (and Newton) loudly that he would rather be glad to be rid of the kaiju guts flung across his equations when the university positions where sent in flurries of letters to them both. Hermann had always been rather reluctant to be _emotional_ and _vulnerable_ —yes, it may have been a defensive thing, but he knew better than to spill blood in the water by saying he would miss the other scientist. He instead chose to look away whenever Newton’s smile dropped at such words.

They may have drifted with that horrid kaiju brain, and Newton may have shared a headspace with him in that time, but he would be damned if he ever gave the other scientist fresh material to rip and tear at. He would just clear his throat and read aloud a letter from another university to see what new objections Newton could come up with as to why he shouldn’t work there.

 

He eventually decided to follow where Mako Mori led (like many others had; looking to her in the shadow of Stacker Pentecost’s death) and stuck with the PPDC. He’d intended to take a university position; to retire as it were to a more comfortable lifestyle where he could work with mathematics in peace. He’d expected that Newton would follow, when he’d told the other scientist.

But Newton had given him this sort of manic half-apologetic smile and said he’d chosen to move to the private sector. That he’d been given a decent offer and they’d said he could revolutionise their tech with his help—and Hermann had selfishly, bitterly, snapped something about how he never could resist a stroke to his ego. The argument that followed was sharp—jagged in all the ways that they hadn’t been since they drifted together.

It ended abruptly when Newt just shrugged and went, “Well, with how much you were going on about being excited to have a lab without me I just assumed you didn’t want me to hang around.”

Hermann stopped mid-yell, lowering his hand from where it’d been wildly gesticulating—he hadn’t realised that perhaps his defensiveness and closed-off nature had… backfired. Or rather, had the intended effect. He’d thought, stupidly, that Newton would’ve realised that he didn’t actually _mean_ it.

“Oh,” he’d replied dumbly, wondering when it was that he’d grown attached to the other man. “Well—”

Newt cut him off easily, a smile plastered on his face like it meant nothing to him either way. “It’s chill, dude. I’m gonna be put in charge of a division of little underlings _and_ I still get to fuck around with kaiju bits in my spare time. Upwards and onwards, y’know?”

Hermann _did_ know; he understood. It didn’t stop him from feeling less dumbstruck; reeling with the realisation that Newton wasn’t going to be there for the next ten years to yell at and work with. It wasn’t even that he was mourning the loss of a target for his ire, it was the realisation that not only had he considered Newton Geiszler his friend but also that he was going to _miss_ him.

“We can still chat through emails, Hermann. It’s not like I’m dying,” Newt finally said as the awkward silence dragged on. “But, man, I really gotta get all my specimens packed up before the PPDC tries to get them burnt up and taken away.”

It was a testament to Hermann’s guilt at driving the other man away that he didn’t just go to anyone and tell them that Newt had taken the kaiju samples with him instead of having them quarantined and destroyed like they were supposed to.

(Years down the line, when he realised what had happened, what Newton had done—he regretted his decision to let those kaiju samples go. He regretted even more that he’d been too stupid and prideful to let Newt understand that he was afraid of a future without him in the first place; that he’d let Newt slip through his hands and into the arms of the Precursors and that _fucking_ kaiju brain. But he didn’t know now what he would all those years later, and so he let Newton take his awful gooey kaiju parts as a goodbye gift/apology.)

 

His work changed to focus more on improving the jaegers and helping improve the drifting tech as much as he could to better the synch times—how to improve so that if the kaiju _did_ come back, they’d be better prepared. He would email Newton with what news he _was_ allowed to tell an outsider (and it ached to know he couldn’t tell the other man to his face about his amazing breakthroughs; that he wasn’t even supposed to tell him anything now that Newton was just a _civilian_ ). The emails he received back were frequent at first, but after a while the other scientist barely responded and then gave up on replying altogether. Hermann sent a few emails after the lack of replies, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew (had learned) that he wasn’t wanted. That Geiszler (because they weren’t exactly friends anymore, were they?) didn’t give a shit about his old PPDC lab mate.

And it wasn’t exactly like Hermann was personable and nice enough for him to care in the first place. He was abrasive and rude and standoffish—Newton was probably _relishing_ in the fact that he was free of tyrannical, stick-in-the-mud Hermann Gottlieb.

 

Occasionally Shao Corporation would have people come in to visit the Shatterdome—sometimes Geiszler would be one of them. At first, yes, Hermann had been rather excited (internally, of course) at the prospect of being able to apologise and talk it out with Geiszler face-to-face. It just never worked out that way. Any time Hermann managed to get Geiszler alone (always seen now in fancy suits and sunglasses indoors—living up to the fame and arrogance, it seemed), the other scientist would side-track him and cut him off before he could really get any words in.

“Jeez, Hermann, you should really get out of this stuffy lab sometime and come visit me! I got this sweet ass apartment, it’s so cool! Plus, you can meet Alice!” Geiszler had exclaimed, knocking over stacks of Hermann’s equations without a care in the world.

Hermann bit the sides of his cheeks to refrain from yelling about the sheets of paper going _everywhere_ when he realised that Geiszler had mentioned someone else. It didn’t exactly take a rocket scientist (ha-ha, get it?) to work out that ‘Alice’ was probably the romantic interest in Geiszler’s life.

(He didn’t know why that stung. He could barely say he even knew the other man any more. But by God, did it just knock the wind out of him to think that Newt— _Geiszler_ had not only moved on from the PPDC but that he’d started an entirely new life without a single hint of Hermann being part of it.)

“Well, you know, they keep me busy here—” Hermann began to say defensively, riled up now and blotchy-faced without even really knowing why, when Geiszler’s wristwatch beeped loudly.

“Ah, that’s me,” he said semi-apologetically, already beginning to walk away. “It was swell catching up, buddy, but I gotta jet. See you next time, maybe?”

 

It was a recurring theme: Geiszler would appear whenever Shao Corporation visited, hang around Hermann long enough for him to begin to get his hopes up that they could still be friends, bring up the _ever-amazing_ Alice, and then leave after fucking with Hermann’s lab.

Hermann would continually deny being upset later, but people knew to steer clear of his lab after a Shao Corporation visit. Well. They’d steer clearer away from it than they already did.

He hadn’t realised until Geiszler left that nobody would be there for Hermann to talk to until after he left. He’d cultivated an unlikeable disposition so that people would be repelled; that they would gossip about how rude he was rather than his leg—but God, it had felt so jarring to spin around the lab the first few times he’d made a breakthrough only to realise that there was no one for him to cheer with.

 

Hermann refused to visit Geiszler. It was pride that stopped him. Every time he found himself looking at flight costs, he felt carved out and wounded because it would mean having to meet that dreaded Alice woman and Hermann prided himself on not feeling anything.

(He only realised when Mako poked fun at him gently once after Geiszler had left in a Shao visit that perhaps his feelings for Geiszler were more than just friendship. He’d gone bright red and all but shoved Mako out of his lab when he worked out why he continued to be so upset about Alice.)

And thus, a pattern emerged: Hermann never visited, and Geiszler never stayed long enough for an apology to be spat out.

 

 

It was regrettable, later, when he realised that Alice was the kaiju brain. If he could’ve stowed away his ego long enough to visit his apparent crush (though he loathed such childish terms for it), he would’ve been able to help Newton. To stop the Precursors from invading his mind.

If he’d been a better friend (a better _person_ ), Mako would still be alive. All the Jaeger pilots would still be alive. The kaiju wouldn’t have destroyed half of Sydney and Tokyo.

His guilt bore heavy on his shoulders when Newton was brought into the Shatterdome for ‘questioning’. He could’ve stopped it all if he’d just visited; just reached out and asked _why_ Newton had ignored him for so long.

(But Hermann had been burnt before, and he hadn’t wanted that awful confirmation that Newton had only ever tolerated him because it was necessary—that as soon as he was able, he ran because he couldn’t bear the thought of being near Hermann a single second longer than he had to.)

 

There were a lot of should-haves and what-ifs that ran through Hermann’s head. None of it changed what had happened. Newton—the Precursors— _Newton_ had tried to kill Hermann, so he could open the breaches and end the world.

And yet, he stood in his rebuilt lab at all his half-finished equations, and he ignored the awful way his stomach dropped any time his awful brain ran the likelihood that the PPDC was going to kill Newton for what he’d done. That Newton would be put on trial and locked away (if he even got that far) without Hermann ever having had the chance to apologise for driving him to this in the first place.

 

He didn’t visit Newton in his cell. It was part of that pattern, you see. Newton was the one visiting; and Hermann was the one too proud and ashamed to return the favour.

**Author's Note:**

> listen i wanted to write some shit explaining why they don't speak for so long and also i'm sad about these idiots also i wrote this in a short amount of time so forgive the shitty nature of it  
> title comes from "oh devil" by electric guest  
> @ me on twitter: archistrateges  
> @ me on tumblr: zenyattta


End file.
